


Learning to Trust

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-06 22:06:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8771134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Jim has never really trusted anyone...





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentine Thursday prompts 'trust' and 'real men'

Learning to Trust

by  Bluewolf

Jim Ellison was not a man who trusted readily.

He had a history of abandonment - or what he interpreted as abandonment - that started with his mother, who disappeared from his life when he was eight. When he was ten he had overheard his father speaking to her on the phone, had somehow heard her voice as well as his father's, and it had been clear that she wanted nothing to do with her sons. She didn't want to take them for a few days while his Dad was away on business.

Jim hadn't realized that his Dad even knew where his missing mother was.

In the end Sally, the housekeeper, had put off her planned holiday to look after him and Stevie.

Sally was the one constant in his life, the one person who seemed to love the two boys - though when his Dad was around she maintained a sort of distance.

Jim was pretty sure he knew why. His Dad was not a man to encourage his sons to get too friendly with the hired help.

He was fond of Sally in a way that he was not fond of his father. William Ellison wanted his sons to be _men_ and taught them that competition was the only 'relationship' suitable for a Real Man - and a Truly Real Man always won that competition. Jim instinctively felt that co-operation was often better, more productive - but William totally dismissed co-operation as a weakness. Friendship was a weakness. Amicable acquaintance was all right, but should be tempered by 'How can I use him?' and 'How can I keep from being used by him?'

Sometimes Jim wondered what his father would do if he really needed someone's help, but decided that his father would probably die rather than ask anyone for help. William, he decided, trusted people even less than Jim himself did.

When he was eighteen Jim left home and joined the army. He did well there - the lessons in competition had been well learned - but there was co-operation there as well. He found that being, in effect, 'first among equals' was reassuring; plus he had a sense of responsibility towards the men he eventually, as Captain, commanded.

But he didn't trust them - not totally. He trusted them to watch his back as he watched theirs in mutual protection... but on a personal level he remained ever so slightly wary...

But wary though he was, he certainly hadn't expected to be given faulty intel regarding his unit's mission to Peru.

And when their helicopter crashed, and his men all died... Academically he knew it wasn't their fault, but he couldn't help but think that by dying they were abandoning him, leaving him to carry on with their mission alone.

The Chopek were casually friendly - especially Incacha the shaman - but he knew he wasn't totally trusted by the tribe. He was accepted, but with reservations. He was, after all, an alien from a world they didn't know or want to know. They appreciated the help he gave them against the men who would have killed them, but they always knew that one day he would leave.

When he was eventually rescued, Jim knew that whatever trust he had had in his superior officers was dead. Nobody had looked for his missing unit - in eighteen months nobody had searched for them... They had been abandoned...

His period of enlistment ended while he was in Peru, and instead of re-upping, as he had originally intended, he took his honorable discharge and headed home by a somewhat scenic route, giving himself a short holiday. In Bali he met Lila Hobson, and had a fairly passionate week with her... He really thought they had something good going, but at the end of a week, she disappeared without a word.

He went back to Cascade. Rented an apartment.

After thinking about it for a day or two, he applied to join the Cascade police.

As an ex-army captain, he got an accelerated course through the Academy; did a mandatory year in Patrol, during which he passed the detective exam, then moved on to Vice. It was early in that year that he met Danny Choi - an underweight seventeen-year-old who had been arrested along with two older boys for fighting. While the arrested boys were being put into Jim's Patrol car, a hysterical young girl had run up, hitting Jim, and screaming, "Danny didn't do anything! The others were hurting me and Danny was stopping them!"

It turned out that the two Danny had attacked had tried to rape Danny's twelve-year-old sister.

Their parents had disappeared some months earlier, and Danny was desperately trying to support his young sister.

Jim discussed things with Danny, got Betty into a good foster home, and acted as Danny's big brother until the teen was old enough to go to the police Academy.

He wasn't a trusting man, but Jim's protective instincts were strong.

He was in Vice for only a few months before applying for a vacancy in Major Crime - he saw too much in Vice of the cut-throat selfishness that his father had tried to instil in him, had managed to instil in Stephen - he remembered an incident involving his father's Cobra, when in a fit of temper Stephen had damaged it - but Jim, who was old enough to drive, had been blamed, accused of taking it out without permission... He knew what his brother had done, but he refused to tell tales.

That had been something else that left him just that little bit less trusting... and made him decide not to contact either his father or his brother when he went back to Cascade, although he did regret that his decision meant it would be difficult for him to contact Sally.

Difficult - but not impossible. Over the next five years he met up with her a few times, when his father believed she was visiting her sister. Though... in a twisted kind of way, even that didn't help his trust issues, because he was aware that in order to see him, she was lying to his father.

Simon Banks partnered him with Jack Pendergrast, and for a short while life was as it had been in the army; they watched each other's backs, were casually friends; but then Jack disappeared with a million dollars that was the ransom for Philip Brackley. The kidnapped Philip was never seen again, and the assumption was that Jack had walked away with the money and in the absence of the ransom the kidnappers killed their victim.

Jim wasn't sure... but when the consensus seemed to be that Jack had walked away with the money, sheer pigheadedness made Jim defend him.

***

When Blair Sandburg - yes, conned his way into Jim's life, Jim was too grateful for the help the younger man was giving him to push him away; but he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And drop it did... the day Jim discovered that the first draft of Blair's thesis had ended up in the hands of a publisher who was tossing excerpts from it to the media with gay abandon.

Almost unbearably hurt - after three years Jim had almost begun to believe that in Blair he had found the one man in all the world that he could trust unreservedly - Jim reacted badly. Only to have Blair very publicly refute the work in the thesis, claiming it as fraudulent.

And when he spoke to Blair about it, Blair simply said, "I had a responsibility to maintain your privacy, your anonymity. But even without that, a fine friend I would have been, betraying your trust like that. It was only a book."

Jim stared at him, speechless. Blair thought he, Jim, trusted him? And in that moment, Jim realized that Blair hadn't been wrong. Against all the odds, he had begun to trust Blair...

"It was your life," he said softly.

Blair shrugged. "I don't really know what I was expecting to do with it, though, and, uh...I mean, where did I get off following you around for three years pretending I was a cop?"

"This self-deprecation don't suit you, you know." Jim said softly. "Officially you might have been just an observer, but you were the best cop I've ever met and the best partner I could have ever asked for. You've been a great friend and you've pulled me through some pretty weird stuff." And wasn't that true!

It had been a long time since that first betrayal, when his mother walked out... and after speaking to Blair he realized that he had not experienced betrayal after betrayal in the years since then. Oh, there had been some, like Colonel Norman Oliver, whose treachery had been deadly... but there had been plenty of others who could have been good friends, if he had only let them close to him.

But Blair... yes. The best partner he could ever have hoped for, who had unhesitatingly thrown away his own future so that Jim could keep his.

Jim suspected that he would still never really be able to trust anyone completely unreservedly - apart from Blair - but at least in future he wouldn't automatically distrust everyone he met.

And he would start with his fellow detectives. His relationship with them - especially Simon and Joel - while amicable enough, had always been, on his side, a little distant... But now that he realized he was looking at their relationship with him objectively, rather than with a subjective bias caused by... yes, caused by his family, the people he should have been the ones he could depend on the most, he knew that they were like Blair. Men who would never betray him. Men he could trust, if he would only allow himself to do so.

Could he?

Yes, he decided. He could - and he would.


End file.
